Looks like your Saturday night is now open again, as Women in Animation is postponing its Battle of the Animation Bands. Here’s the lowdown, straight from WIA:

Women in Animation International’s co-presidents, Rita Street and Jan Nagel, regret to announce the Battle of the Animation Bands has been postponed. The event scheduled for Saturday, September 25 will not be held due to a lack of ticket sales. All ticket holders will be reimbursed.

Rita and Jan want to thank Bonsai Tribe, Groove Bazaar and Go-Go Global!, the three amazing contestants, DJ Krisz Klink and 6 Point Harness for the venue. WIA International is looking for another date in the very near future.

“We are just postponing this event. Watch for the next date,” said Rita Street.

Well, now I feel a little stupid. For what seems like 72 years now I - and most everyone who’s mentioned or written about the show as far as I know - have referred to Cartoon Network’s Sym-Bionic Titan as the creation of Genndy Tartakovsky. So imagine how chagrined I was during the opening of tonight’s premiere when the credits told us Genndy’s a co-creator along with Bryan Andrews and Paul Rudish. So you know, Bryan was a key contributor to Clone Wars early on as well as on Samurai Jack. He even helped out on Teenage Robot for a while. And Paul, well, Paul’s one of the top artists in the business, with credits stretching back to Dexter’s, Powerpuff, through Korgoth and Clone Wars and Samurai Jack, and up through Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and the upcoming My Little Pony series. If you saw tonight’s episode, you saw the guys pulling no [Read more…]

If you call us tonight between 8:00 and 8:30 p.m. don’t expect us to answer the phone; we’ll be too busy watching the premiere of Genndy Tartakovsky’s new Cartoon Network series, Sym-Bionic Titan.

You know, since the mid-90s Genndy’s produced about 10,000 hours of cartoons for CN, and his work on a bad day is still about the best thing you’ll see on TV in any given week. And Sym-Bionic Titan is far from Genndy on a bad day; in fact, it’s pretty marvelous. Worth pointing out, too, is Cartoon Network now has quite the formidable action line-up on Friday nights with Batman, Ben 10, Titan, Generator Rex, and Clone Wars, a far cry from where the network was at the beginning of this year. Hats off to all involved.

The Pride of Scranton, PA, Eileen Brennan, is now a certified children’s book author and illustrator. Random House, along with Bolder Media, Inc., has published Eileen’s Dirtball Pete to much rejoicing. No, really. Here’s what Publishers Weekly has to say:

Debut writer Brennan’s wonderfully stolid narrative voice establishes its authority from the get-go: “Dirtball Pete looked like something the cat dragged in,” it starts. “It was a fact.” Pete’s stay in the bathtub before his school’s “Fifty States and Why They’re Great” presentation is a long one (“I’m going to leave that auditorium proud of you,” his mother says grimly, scrubbing him with a brush), but, mysteriously, he still smells terrible afterwards. “Oh, no!” his mother says. “Pet ferrets must stay home!” Jittery digital cartoons show Pete with a big head, spindly appendages, scrabbly hair that refuses to be tamed, and tic-tac-toe dirt stains spattered liberally across his mug. Unexpectedly, though, Dirtball Pete [Read more…]

Best wishes to JG Quintel and his cast crew tonight; his Regular Show premieres on Cartoon Network at 8:15 p.m. (That’s right. 8:15 p.m. It’s a terrible time to ask audiences to remember to tune in, but I guess the network believes most Regular Show viewers will already be on hand from watching Adventure Time. CN’s whole quarter-hour programming philosophy deserves a diatribe, but not here.)

Anyhoo. As you may know, Regular Show is the one series (so far) to come out of the network’s aborted Cartoonstitute shorts program. While there were loads of talented filmmakers in that mix, if there were one guy to place your money on to deliver a funny, cool cartoon, it’s JG.

Here’s creator Bob Boyle’s old storyboard for the Wubbzy main title sequence. Note how on the older pages you can still see the Wubbzy, Widget and Walden title, one of a few names considered before Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! was settled upon.

The Wubbzy Goes to School DVD is now available ($12.99 on Amazon; cheap!). With a Wubbtastic running time of seventy minutes, the DVD includes the cartoons “Who Needs School?,” “New Kid on the Block,” “Gotta Dance,” “Wubbzy the Star,” “You Gotta Have Art,” and “Magic Tricks.” Title cards!:

Hey, everyone. We’re going to be light in the posts for the next few days as our crack team of computer technologists (above) moves our blogging platform. This gives each and every one of us more time to enjoy the great outdoors a bit more than we have been.